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RaptorM60

DayZ.com website - Post your ideas and suggestions for improvements!

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Hello everyone, 

first of all, since I'm kind of new around here, let me start with introducing myself: my name is Martin, and starting this year, I joined the DayZ team as its new Brand Manager. This basically means that, together with @Baty Alquawen @Hicks_206 (DayZ) and other members of the DayZ Dev Team, I'm constantly trying to figure out how to improve our communication with you, our community, and how to best present DayZ to the entire gaming world. 

A major part of my role in the DayZ team is spearheading the development of the DayZ website and all related online services, which is where we're finally getting back to the topic :)

Right now, we'd like to make a significant update to the design and overall usability of the DayZ website. At first, we'll be focused on fixing some of the most obvious problems and making sure that the content on our website is up to date, but we'd also like to start a continuous process of smaller iterations with the ultimate goal of making DayZ.com the one place where you'll always happily end up going to get your daily dose of news about DayZ development and DayZ in general.

To make that happen, I'd like to ask for your feedback and ideas - take a look at our current website (including the forums), think about how you personally get your DayZ news and content (including community live streams or YouTube videos!) and how we could make that process easier for you.

While we have a pretty decent pool of ideas ourselves, the end user of our website will always know more, so please do share your ideas with us! I'll do my best to be active in this thread and reply to your posts.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We know you guys all want more development videos, screenshots and other cool visual things from the upcoming updates. Trust me, we're doing everything we can to have these available for you, but we also want to avoid creating unnecessary hype too early. Please keep that in mind when writing down your ideas. Thanks!

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Thank you VERY much for posting this! It's always nice to see that the DayZ Staff and Devs care about their consumer and how their product looks on the outside. We can all appreciate this gesture as it's good for everyone involved and gets us to a more personalized DayZ page.

Personally, I find myself on the DayZ Forums a lot more than just the DayZ.com because it seems like this is the place where all info is centered. - I would like to see a DayZ.com that is more revealing about talks between the Developers/Players on Twitter, these Forums, the Reddit, and even youtube videos! - In a way of saying, the DayZ.com needs to be the Mecca for all DayZ related topics, news, and excitement. I understand that you guys don't want to create unnecessary/early hype, but if you guys want more foot traffic, I would say a weekly Dev picture showcasing something interesting, NEW OR NOT, would definitely get us players to be all over that site every week. - We just need something to talk about, even if it's a picture of the Staff room so we can see where all the Devs work and such.

On the Twitter Broadcast, I would like Brian Hicks, Eugen Harton, and Peter Nespensny to be followed also, as well as any other Devs/Staff that are the 'face' of DayZ.

It would also be neat to see a section for Community Spotlights/Great vids of DayZ so that newer players can be hyped up into playing the game.

-- Also, a bit extra, but I think the Steam page needs a bit of an update with new graphics/visuals for the pics showcased, as well as the Dev Q&As being placed on there. More personal touches always feel more sincere :D 

Thanks for listening! 

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Hello Martin, and welcome. Espa covered pretty much everything I had in mind up above. The one thing I would add is making sure the site is mobile friendly.

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We're very lucky as a community to have someone like Martin in this role. Welcome, friend! :)

Espa made some good points above, and I'm always happy to help with images of course.

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Great initiative. Right now a lot of the obvious "info" on DayZ is articles on third party websites, and lot of that is out of date or superceded by new developments.

My suggestions:

- Dramatically expand the FAQ to actually answer some questions. Be specific. Cover things like explainingwhat the character controller is, what the renderer, what Enfusion is and how it differs from RV... etc. And be technical!

- Dev timeline, and not that thing that's on the current site. Give Bohemia Interactive's side of the story, and write up the history of DayZ through the mod, pre-alpha, principal development, early access, the long road to beta and present. Highlight when big decisions were made and the rationale behind them. Mark off when key people joined the team. Basically, write the story of what you have achieved. If you're stuck, Tatanko has done much of this!

- A feed from the version tracker logging commits to the currently being worked on versions.

- Clear instructions on how to use the feedback tracker. Clear instructions on how to report security flaws and server abuse. Do not hide these away on the forums or in a status report.

- Make the status reports a proper blog. Use tags so we can follow key subjects through multiple reports. 

- A proper vision for the final project. Not a roadmap, but a diagram or something laying out the pillars of the game and the rationale behind them.

- I love Brian, but if possible, get someone to jazz up and proof anything he writes. ;-)

- Multilingual support for all the content on site.

- Dev profiles

 

Edited by narchy
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Welcome to the pack Martin. Good luck. ;)

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2 minutes ago, narchy said:

- Make the status reports a proper blog. Use tags so we can follow key subjects through multiple reports. 

- A proper vision for the final project. Not a roadmap, but a diagram or something laying out the pillars of the game and the rationale behind them.

 

Wow you just underlined a post I made.

The tag idea is genius!

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Welcome Martin!

I would like to suggest that we have a comprehensive bug list, suggestion list, and FAQ with links to the status reports that have to be clicked through by all new users.

DayZ is such an enormous project with so much history and very little to get the new players up to speed in a centralized location.

One huge bright red unavoidable banner at the top of the forum home page that says, "New players, click here for vital info! Think you have a new question, suggestion, or bug report? Check here first!".

The more people understand the dev process, where it came from, and at what point in development we are at, the more constructive their contributions can be, and the less cluttered the forum will be.

Thank you!

Now where's the emoticons?  D:

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panix199 asked me to place my reddit suggestions here aswell:

''

Yall should first of all hire /u/DayzTV and make sure DayZ.com has an updated Chernarus+ map

Second you should have a tab in on the website that shows twitch streamers in real time.

Easy acces to an updated wiki would be great too.

Also change up the colour scheme/font etc. Make the website feel fresh

Links to Miniz on app store ( and later android store) from the website would be great.

A feedback button for anyone thats been on the forums for over a year would be great.

Sidebar with dev tweets Real time stable and exp versions in the corner of the website.

Player online real time would be cool too.

Ofcourse an updated news bar

Remove the 2015 roadmap as it is outdated.

Maybe a list of dev names with an " at work" light next to it, when lit it means the dev is in the office at work with dayz this way people can see how hard you guys work.

Important : people hate text news and haters of the game wont even read SR anyway so there should be a bar with new dev videos and trello pictures to show new and old players what you guys are working on.

The ability to login with your BI account should stay.

A upcoming dayz youtuber spotlight weekly on the main page of the website for free advertising : this is important because youtubers create a bigger player base

A stickied in depth explanation video (video over text if possible peoppe tend to be lazy) by the devs on the main page why development is slow

mobile-friendly

All I could come up with for now hope I helped

 

Greetings, TheFriendlyDutchman/jorn818

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I've watched people meltdown, upset over DayZ development, and spelling out why to varying degrees of detail. These are usually rife with misinformation. By the time they get to this point, no amount of correcting their viewpoint will help. They've been stewing over it for months, if not years, and surrounded themselves with other angry people who are reinforcing their ideas. If I was in your shoes, Mr. Raptor, I would boil down the bulk of the negative criticisms that are leveled at DayZ and refute them with facts in an easy to read format. Then I would put an eye-grabbing link to it on every single page of the DayZ forum.

I'm guessing the conventional wisdom is to ignore the criticisms since they are largely inaccurate and the game will eventually speak for itself. My thinking is that, in the interim, new players or potential new customers will be blasted within moments of taking even a casual glance at DayZ with a huge dose of very serious negativity. It could take as little as 5 minutes to reach the conclusion that DayZ is some kind of cashgrab based on all the garbage out there between Steam reviews and various forum posts. It takes months to find all the counterpoints, assuming a person hasn't been poisoned against really hearing it by the time they do stumble across it.

Edited by ColdAtrophy
Grammar
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I would like to see a portion of the new website dedicated to showing off the models and textures using an embedded viewer such as Sketchfab or Marmoset. Thank again DayZ devs!

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I think most of the suggestions I was about to mention are already here. I would add:

  • A categorized Server tracker/list with reviews and a reputation system
  • A scoreboard for in-game achievements (player who survived longer, the one that ran most, etc, etc)
  • A very noticeable link to the feedback tracker, so people could automatically post a bug report there without having to deal with the complexity it has.
  • A Wiki 
  • Featured Videos from youtubers that share your game vision (something balanced between pvp and survival, etc) so they give new players a story of what the game is about.
  • Mention of some hot topics in the forums maybe
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I think the homepage should be much more "noob friendly" as some have stated.

For example, status reports are fantastic sources of information but as a new PC gamer or EA gamer one might not even understand what a status report is. I think an explanation as to the massive well of experience in Chernarus would do a website well. 

Like a "What is DayZ" type of deal.

Also, I think one of the major reasons this forum isn't frequented as often by many casual players is the expanse of sub-topics and categories in the forum. For me personally I started playing DAYZ when i saw a certain Mr.Moon play it in a piece of content. A lot of content creators share videos, photos, and stories here.

Make those a little more basic to get to. Maybe a scroll box similar to your screenshot scroll box for survivor stories, developmental discussion, and video content within a sort of "Choose your topic" scroll right to left box each one allowing you to scroll down on recent topics.

I don't know... I'm not good at website development or much else for that matter, and I trust ya'll to make the best decisions. Welcome Martin, appreciate you extending your hand to the community for our "opinions" it means a lot and is a great direction to start in ;)

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How about a live twitch Q&A with the team, or even a youtube video using questions from twitter or youtube  with additional visual support with the current work and produce one each quarter with goals and objectives.




Kind Regards 


ESSR 

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Welcome, and let me thank you ahead of time for your work.

I have no doubt, it will be much appreciated. 

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Welcome Raptor!

I think this kind of stuff (I’m not calling you a “stuff” btw) is just what we need as a community right now: more and better communication and definitely new forums features to make it more intuitive and that generates desire to participate.

I`m going to address some ideas later about some things I always want to see in the Dayz forums, but first of all, because you say you are new, if you don`t mind, I want to make you a question and an advice:

  • Advice: These are hard times and trolling/haters are everywhere (just an example above me). Please do not listen or feed them.
  • Question: What is your expertise? Programmer? Designer? Community manager? I wonder because we really need someone who really understand the game and its development to have a good and productive feedback so I just want to know if you are that kind of guy or a “forum moderator”.

 

P.D: I do not doubt that you will forgive my poor English

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3 hours ago, EatSleepSurviveRepeat said:

How about a live twitch Q&A with the team, or even a youtube video using questions from twitter or youtube  with additional visual support with the current work and produce one each quarter with goals and objectives.




Kind Regards 


ESSR 

I really hope Hicks and rest of the team start to use the official DayZ channel on Twitch more as the game becomes more "complete".  I can see why they wouldn't see much point in the game's current state, but it could be pretty fun to use live streams to show off the new features and mechanics that come with the Beta.

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Whoa this is going fast! Thanks for the warm welcome everyone, a lot of good ideas here already. This will be a bit longer post, but let me start with this:

9 hours ago, Asmondian said:

Question: What is your expertise? Programmer? Designer? Community manager? I wonder because we really need someone who really understand the game and its development to have a good and productive feedback so I just want to know if you are that kind of guy or a “forum moderator”.

I have a general marketing communications background, with a little bit of an overlap to the digital marketing world (creating website content as a copywriter, managing social media and all that), but I am also a massive DayZ fan with 500 hours clocked in (I know I can't compare to most of you here or the guys in the dev team, but hey, that's certainly a good number for a regular marketing person! :D).

I had worked at Bohemia Interactive publishing department on some of our other projects (like Ylands) before I got assigned to the DayZ team, but I've been following DayZ development from day 1.

18 hours ago, Espa said:

I would say a weekly Dev picture showcasing something interesting, NEW OR NOT, would definitely get us players to be all over that site every week. - We just need something to talk about, even if it's a picture of the Staff room so we can see where all the Devs work and such.

On the Twitter Broadcast, I would like Brian Hicks, Eugen Harton, and Peter Nespensny to be followed also, as well as any other Devs/Staff that are the 'face' of DayZ.

It would also be neat to see a section for Community Spotlights/Great vids of DayZ so that newer players can be hyped up into playing the game.

-- Also, a bit extra, but I think the Steam page needs a bit of an update with new graphics/visuals for the pics showcased, as well as the Dev Q&As being placed on there. More personal touches always feel more sincere :D 

Baty was actually also thinking about occasionally taking some photos, so we'll see about that :)

As for the Twitter accounts of our developers: we're doing our best to have interesting/new content Tweeted via @dayzdevteam only, that's where it belongs - we've had news coming from lots of different sources in the past, including personal Twitter accounts, and it got quite problematic over time. We have completely and fully moved the focus to our official channels some time ago, so we probably won't do what you're suggesting (just thought this deserved an explanation though).

Community section is definitely something we will expand upon, I guess Brian will cover that at some point, after we summarize our ideas internally! :)

Good point with the Steam page, I'll see how we can improve that. Thanks!

18 hours ago, kerbo said:

Hello Martin, and welcome. Espa covered pretty much everything I had in mind up above. The one thing I would add is making sure the site is mobile friendly.

Both our Web Designer and our Web Developers are always working with responsive designs, it's going to be a challenge with some of the more content heavy pages, but our aim is a fully responsive, mobile friendly design ;)

17 hours ago, Espa said:

https://dayz.com/blog/dayz-moving-into-2015

This is way old and is giving bad information to the players. - This needs to be worked into Moving into 2017/Beta

Yes, this will be one of the first things to be updated in terms of the content that would be highlighted on the website.

17 hours ago, narchy said:

Great initiative. Right now a lot of the obvious "info" on DayZ is articles on third party websites, and lot of that is out of date or superceded by new developments.

My suggestions...

 

Lots of good points! I'll think about your ideas for expanding the FAQ - it should remain simple, but we could definitely at least provide links to more complex answers there. Baty also brought this up the other day, so it probably deserves some attention and we'll talk about it :)

Dev timeline: I suppose the original idea with the timeline that's currently on our website was something like that, but I can see why it can be hard to track in detail. Nevertheless, we have something similar to what you describe in mind (although probably not as detailed) for our a new layout of the DayZ DevHub page. Let's see how that will work :)

Instructions for Feedback Tracker are a very good point, and I agree that they need to have more attention brought to them. So are tags for all content or dev profiles - our content management system does not currently support that, but I'll try to have that changed. I'd also love to see some basic search function on the website.

DayZ 1.0 Vision: The way we have things set up now is we put strong focus on the closest upcoming update only (to manage expectations). That works now, we'll see if we can add something more later on. 

Multilingual support or commits are unfortunately not within our scope, the former mostly because that's just a looot of work for our already busy publishing department at Bohemia, and the latter because

a) we can't publicly show all the commits (security reasons) and would have to filter them out anyway, which is not realistically achievable and
b) most of them would probably just not make sense to players since you guys don't have the broader development context (I would probably not fully understand them myself)

16 hours ago, ☣BioHaze☣ said:

I would like to suggest that we have a comprehensive bug list, suggestion list, and FAQ with links to the status reports that have to be clicked through by all new users.

DayZ is such an enormous project with so much history and very little to get the new players up to speed in a centralized location.

One huge bright red unavoidable banner at the top of the forum home page that says, "New players, click here for vital info! Think you have a new question, suggestion, or bug report? Check here first!".

Good point sir, I can see that banners can get annoying quickly, but having vital information presented to people in some user-friendly way would probably help us a lot. I myself have invested a lot of time into thinking about this, we'll see if we can come up with something.

15 hours ago, thefriendlydutchman said:

panix199 asked me to place my reddit suggestions here aswell:

Many of these things are already on our to-do list, thanks! We're still thinking how to tackle our Status Reports, we know they are a lot of text, but it's often the only thing we can really do. Map and wiki are a good example of content that's better handled by our community actually. We'll probably make a Q&A video with @eugenharton at some point, and that should be a good video to explain the ins and outs of our development in a format that's not based on a lot of text :)

14 hours ago, exwoll said:

I think most of the suggestions I was about to mention are already here. I would add:

  • A categorized Server tracker/list with reviews and a reputation system
  • A scoreboard for in-game achievements (player who survived longer, the one that ran most, etc, etc)
  • A very noticeable link to the feedback tracker, so people could automatically post a bug report there without having to deal with the complexity it has
  • Mention of some hot topics in the forums maybe

Server list is not something we will do now, so are player stats or achievements, but you got a good point there with the Feedback Tracker. We do want to have some permanent spotlight for hot forums topics on the Dev Hub! :)

Thanks everyone, keep them coming please, this is really good!

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I had an idea to improve the feedback tracker a while ago, but i don't think i ever wrote it down somewhere.

So here it is:

Give us an interactive Map of Chernarus where you can see all acknowledged map errors (floating or misplaced objects, etc.). I once tried to document the stuff i found, but it was realy hard to see what was reported already and what wasn't, because there were MANY tickets, and some/most even had more than one spot covered.

Since we have the debug monitor in the experimental branch it should be easy to pinpoint the exact location of those issues.

I think, you would ideally have the map, and for every issue a pin that you can hover your mouse over to see a screenshot, description and a link to the related ticket. That would propably make it easier for reporting new map bugs and also fixing those for the map designers.

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1 hour ago, RaptorM60 said:

-snip-

 

Good point sir, I can see that banners can get annoying quickly, but having vital information presented to people in some user-friendly way would probably help us a lot. I myself have invested a lot of time into thinking about this, we'll see if we can come up with something.

-snip-

Thank you for the response.

Regarding annoying banners, we could have something that would give you the option to hide the banner after 100 posts or 3-6 months membership (for the lurkers) perhaps.

 

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15 minutes ago, ☣BioHaze☣ said:

Thank you for the response.

Regarding annoying banners, we could have something that would give you the option to hide the banner after 100 posts or 3-6 months membership (for the lurkers) perhaps.

 

option to hide it should be hidden is some menu, so everyone that puts in the effort to hide that banner will most likely also read the text behind the banner. and with some hint in the text on how to hide the banner the circle is closed.

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1 hour ago, HaseDesTodes said:

I had an idea to improve the feedback tracker a while ago, but i don't think i ever wrote it down somewhere.

So here it is:

Give us an interactive Map of Chernarus where you can see all acknowledged map errors (floating or misplaced objects, etc.). I once tried to document the stuff i found, but it was realy hard to see what was reported already and what wasn't, because there were MANY tickets, and some/most even had more than one spot covered.

Since we have the debug monitor in the experimental branch it should be easy to pinpoint the exact location of those issues.

I think, you would ideally have the map, and for every issue a pin that you can hover your mouse over to see a screenshot, description and a link to the related ticket. That would propably make it easier for reporting new map bugs and also fixing those for the map designers.

Good idea!

The list of the bugs already reported and acknowledged by the dev team (as well as the fixed ones) should be clearly visible to everyone, it will cut out the players base need for feedback from the devs about the things that they know are broken, the ones that are being worked on, and the ones that had been fixed (specially these ones, since they will give the idea of the progress the game has).

Also if the acknowledged bugs could be broken down into groups and receive a reference fix schedule, so people knows when they could expect them to be fixed, it would make it easier for everyone to just give a link to the source for people that keeps asking "when are you planning to fix X?" 

 

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